Good things come to those who wait, they say. Patience is a virtue, they say. Well, after slowly but surely plugging away with this STSC venture for around 2 years now we are seeing that it is starting to gain traction. Nothing too fast (this often indicates a flash-in-the-pan, fashion driven rise which like all waves soon recedes again) but a nice steady increase in readers. And writers too.
So it’s only fitting then that we start off the week with a debut story submission from
. And he’s come out swinging. This is a very short story, but Morgan is able to do a lot with a little here, which is the sign of a writer who knows his business. Turns out he has a novel in progress too. I’m very interested to see Morgan’s trajectory as part of our fold. Exciting times ahead.Enjoy.
TJB.
The state trooper who pulled me over has been sitting in his cruiser so long it’s cold in my truck. Lit by the green glow of his screen, he reads my record long as my arm, my life in crime. I try not to look in the rearview mirror at the trooper, to avoid provoking him. I wait, with two hearts beating under my seat: a glass meth pipe—I say a prayer that all the resin is burned away—and the Deagle.
“Deagle” is short for Desert Eagle, the .50-caliber pistol whose stupid end throws a monster flash. It’s also the name of a video war game set in the Middle East that I think about while I drive the hay baler or combine. Scenes from the computerized desert flow in pure, OLED colors, Apache helicopters fly thirty meters above dun-colored hills that virtually drape over the Texas landscape. But the vision doesn’t last; in the next moment, Deagle the game fades and dim life returns, shapeless as a sheet thrown over a mattress lying on the floor.
This is no place, Texas, where we kill what we eat. In front of me stretches a two-lane road that, if you’re lucky, will take you through the heart of the county in one piece under a darkness that lies heavily on the fields, as though a huge hand presses down on the Earth at night. Then you’ll see a tweaker’s headlights approach. No one drives these dark field ways unless they’re like me, half drunk and crazy, sipping a glass stem.
Sometimes, I step out behind my house to the appliance cemetery with the Deagle. I John Wayne the trigger, and the muzzle flash blows on repeat. It says that I can cut the air with flame and light and that I am alive and present, even while I’m living no place and only putting bullet holes into microwave oven windows and freezer doors.
I’ve lived my whole life in this town, and there’s only one road and only one bar with one sidewalk out front, and only one auburn-haired woman with great getaway sticks, and Izzie’s going to stay mine. Outside the Hi-Lo, an exchange student drinking beer far from A&M will introduce you to his army training. He can kill you on the sidewalk where you, thinking you’re fighting for your girl’s honor, will stagger and sway. Izzie will have the sense to run home for your brother. Since the Special Forces don’t want you, you don’t need the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. In my truck I keep the Deagle, with its white-yellow rose of fire that blooms when I pull the trigger. I’ll take a foreign army throw-down to the sidewalk for her, but after this stop, I’m likely going away. Who in no place can replace me?
The Trooper gets out of his cruiser and approaches. The pipe has rolled out from under my seat and into the footwell. I see resin, even through the dark. The Deagle has stayed put. I fantasize I am taken out of all this by a headlong crash on the road. I die at the wheel. There’s a dark pulse of satisfaction at the sadness my leaving would wreak, although in this world I don’t know who could be sad, beyond Izzy playing the violin for a few days. Only the freight trains sound sad here, and only when they’re leaving.
The Trooper is at my window, his heavy belt, his hand on his gun. I go inside Deagle the game. I’m riding inside a Humvee down a street narrowed by packed earth walls. I’m rolling over an explosive. I’m lifted twenty feet above the deck by the shockwave. I’m eaten by a plume of flame until I become an explosion over the countryside. I throw white sheets of light onto the sides of sleeping farmhouses miles distant. I flash brief life across the Texas fields lying out in all directions, until I can see every place that I’ve ever been.
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